Former Senator Pushed for Balancing the Budget

Warren Rudman, a two-term Republican senator from New Hampshire, helped create the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget act, an early attempt to balance the federal budget through automatic spending cuts.

Mr. Rudman, who died Monday at age 82, also served as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics and helped lead the investigation into the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration.

He was an outspoken centrist who reached across the aisle to Democrats in crafting legislation. When Mr. Rudman declined to run for a third term in 1992 he issued a jeremiad to Washington denouncing "record budget deficits" and "our past profligacy."

The son of a New England furniture manufacturer and the grandson of a Moxie soda distributor, Mr. Rudman grew up in New Hampshire. He saw combat in the Army during the Korean War, attended Boston College Law School, and in 1970 was appointed Attorney General of New Hampshire.

His chief of staff at the time was David Souter, whose nomination to the Supreme Court Mr. Rudman promoted in 1990.

Mr. Rudman was elected to the Senate in 1980, beating a Democratic incumbent while pledging to beef up the armed forces. In office he supported Republican legislation but later said he regretted voting for tax cuts inspired by supply-side economics. In his 1996 political memoir, "Combat," he described Gramm-Rudman as an attempt "to undo the damage wreaked by Reaganomics."

When the bill passed the Senate in 1985, Mr. Rudman described it as "a bad idea whose time has come." The law is often cited as a precursor to the "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts set to take place at year-end unless Congress postpones or resolves the situation.

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Sen. Warren Rudman
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

But Congress immediately set about finding ways around Gramm-Rudman's budget caps and cuts. Targets and cutoffs were raised. The system for determining the size of cuts was found unconstitutional, and the process of mandatory cuts was supplanted by a new law in 1990.

After leaving the Senate, Mr. Rudman served as co-chairman with former Sen. Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat, of a commission that warned of potential terror threats on U.S. soil well before the attacks of Sept., 11, 2001, and recommended creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Rudman's name was floated as a potential vice-presidential running mate for Ross Perot in 1992 and for Bob Dole in 1996.

He continued to call for fiscal discipline and helped found the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates for balanced budgets and changes in entitlement programs.

In a 2010 oral history interview for the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Rudman said the country's fiscal problems couldn't be solved short of a crisis.

"I'm afraid that we're going to have either hyperinflation, skyrocketing interest rates, something," Mr. Rudman said. "I have lost my faith that we can do it voluntarily."

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